The Moth
by LainBay
Summary: This isn't funny. It's very serious. Read and be creeped out! My own corollary of Scott Sherman's book "It's the End of the World as We know it, And I Could Use a Drink".
1. Context Is Important

Hello all. This is a oneshot, and you'd be surprized to know that it COULD happen. I wrote it as a DYS-topian scenario for one of my environmental science classes. Any one of the terrible fates listed in this story is a potential decimator of the human race, of earth!  
  
This is not to say that we should be pessimistic about our chances.  
  
No.  
  
Instead, we should use our skills to get rid of our problems and think critically about what will happen to us if we don't clean up our acts.  
  
Because there's only ONE earth. We only get ONE chance at this.  
  
Happy reading! I hope a few of you are at least disturbed by the end of it!!  
  
Lanenkar 


	2. The Moth

The Moth  
  
_________________________________________________________  
  
Trin woke up gasping.  
  
"God, that was horrible People like that shouldn't go naked...it's worse than ebola "  
  
Lanen was confused and still half asleep as she turned over muttering.   
  
"...burm...bagels...."  
  
Leaning over the side of his bed and reaching out, Trin grabbed Lanen's shoulder and shook her gently.  
  
"Lanen, Lanen, wake up "  
  
He was met with silence, and continued mumbling. He shook her harder, finally losing patience and jerking her roughly.  
  
"....GAHHHHH I'm awake alreddy ...mutter mutter jerk..interrupting...mutter beauty...mutter sleep..."  
  
"Lanen, we've got to get up, remember? We have that paper to write. You remember? Hello? Hello? C'mon, aren't you getting up?"  
  
He sighed to himself. This was only slightly ridiculous. She'd come over last night to work on the final project of the year, waving some book her father had given her, and blathering on about the end of the world. She'd only been a little pasted...just a little drunk. Why had she even bothered to come over like that? They'd gotten no work done whatsoever except argue and then yell at each other late into the night about how the world was crumbling around them. On and on about some silly dead Scott Sherman guy and his stupid book. Or something like that. She'd been upset, crying, yelling, and very confusing. He didn't remember much either, after she'd raided the family liquor cabinet, and then blackmailed him into not telling about it. They finally had just crashed in his room.  
  
She opened her eyes sleepily.  
  
"Where am I?"  
  
Trin groaned and rubbed his eyes with his fingers. This wasn't going to go so well if she was still grumpy from being woken up.  
  
"Well, right now, you're sleeping on the floor of my room with my extra blanket."  
  
This didn't go over well, as she woke up further and opened her bleary eyes completely.  
  
"No, I meant who the hell are you? And where is this place? It looks nothing like home. On earth— I mean."  
  
This was getting stranger and stranger. What was she talking about? Nobody lived on earth anymore. It was impossible. Earth wasn't sustainable any more. Heck, he didn't even remember living on earth before his family had fled to the moon colony. Lanen might though, because her genetics had been tinkered with and no-one really knew how old she was.   
  
"Lanen, it's me, Trin. And you're not on the earth anymore, remember? It had a few problems and everyone had to leave."  
  
There was silence for a moment. Lanen sat up.  
  
"What do you mean, leave? There's nothing wrong with the earth. I've lived on it all my life."  
  
Trin snorted.  
  
"Unless you just experienced some sort of quantum leap through time and space into the twilight zone, you're DREAMING. You've lived here on the moon for twelve years with your foster parents. Remember?"  
  
He decided to abuse her of her strange hungover morning fantasies quickly. He'd just show her the proof. It was all in the Colony's history database anyway. Having a bad family life shouldn't lead to such strange delusions, should it? He could understand losing one's parents at a young age, but she was strange like this all the time. Refusing to fit in, to think how others did, to react in a way that preserved the integrity of their new society on the moon. She was always pulling strange stuff, The Outsider. That was what had fascinated him about her from the beginning.  
  
He shrugged and pulled on his jacket, still feeling the muzzy taste of alcohol on the back of his tongue. Eeling his way out of bed, he headed for the bathroom.  
  
"I'll be out in five minutes, ok?"  
  
Lanen stared at him bemusedly, as though he were a complete stranger, and nodded her head suspiciously. Where could he be going? Who the heck was he? And how, in God's name, had she ended up in this strange room with no windows? The last thing she remembered was going to a frat party and then not much after that. She was a full time college student at the University. And now, now she was somewhere else, in some strange boy's room, who was calling her "Lanen." What the hell had she drunk?  
  
A strange phrase sprang to mind and she giggled. "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I could use a drink."  
  
Still sitting up, she looked around and thought: *Huh. Not much here. It's a room. He sleeps strapped to a fold down bunk, and I'm on the floor, covered by something warm and fuzzy-silk-like.* Several minutes later, the so-called 'Trin' emerged from the second door in the wall, slightly damper and cleaner looking. He didn't even give her a chance to take a shower or clean up at all.  
  
"Still sitting there? C'mon, let's go. I'll show you the main computers. Mine is just as good, but they're huge, and will make you feel better."  
  
Lanen nodded slowly, and he pulled her to her feet, tugging her out the door and down a tubular hallway. After a myriad of bewildering turns, they were back at the same door they started at. At least, that was the private thought that she had.  
  
Tapping the doorplate, Trin pulled her inside into a darkened room, where the screens on the walls turned on slowly after the door opened. *It must have been a motion detector that turned it on,* Lanen thought. Trin spoke abruptly.  
  
"Hey, Vladofjasky, can you give us some info for poor confused Lanen here on the end of the world?"  
  
There was a slight pause, and the main screen came up with an odd-looking talking jackal with an obnoxious Hawaiian print shirt and red nail polish and a mullet squinting grouchily at them in the–— sun?   
  
"Yeah, yeah, sure. Don't I get any love here? It's Vladofjasky this, blah blah blah, Vladofjasky that. Siiiiiiiiigh. Ah well. Isn't it interesting to note that all the theories that the Old-Earthers had about cosmic calamities were all wrong? I mean, they had so many. Let's see, here's a list. There are natural disasters, including asteroid impact, Gamma-ray bursts, collapsing of the universes vacuum, rogue black holes, giant solar flares, reversal of the earth's magnetic field, flood-basalt volcanism, and global epidemics. Then we have Human-triggered Disasters like global warming, ecosystem collapse, biotech disaster, particle accelerator mishap, nano-technology disaster, and environmental toxins." Then there's willful self-destruction: global war, robots taking over, and mass insanity. And, of course, there's alien invasion (thank you SETI), divine intervention, and the realization that it was all a dream. Ha ha ha I love the last one. Talk about extremist denial. The end of the world was no silly joke to be put off. It happened before anyone even knew it had occurred."  
  
Trin grinned. The expression on Lanen's face was priceless. Vladofjasky (also known hereafter as Vlad) continued cheerily.  
  
"You wanna see what really happened? I think I have a vid here somewhere of the whole shebang, the big enchilada, da fin." Stunned silence became assent, and the film rolled. The entire room became a black floating void. Lanen could not even see her shoes, but she could sense Trin and Vlad standing beside her. Astonishingly, the world began to form.  
  
----------------------------------------------------------------  
  
It all started with the atomic bomb.  
  
Well, actually, the fact that everyone and their mother could get the ingredients to make one off of the black market or the internet. This made them obsolete. Pffft. A thing of the past. Why would we need them? There was, of course, the occasional small detonation here and there, but that wasn't the larger part of the problem.  
  
As technology increased and was able to be shrunk to the sub-atomic level and computers that were smarter than humans could think for themselves, humans thought that they had it all in their favor. After all, the economy was expanding, and new ways to reduce aging and better healthcare were becoming available to all. The earth was just fine, thankyouverymuch. Americans loved their SUV's, their high consumption lifestyles, their waste and trash and pollution. The environmentalists, those crazy eco-earth-freaks, touted their stupid "end of the world" prophecies just like the Jehovah's Witnesses, with increasing shrillness. Not even their shining examples of "living lower on the food chain" or "using eco-friendly energy" were enough to rouse the apathetic consumers to jump on their bandwagon and play the horn like Louis Armstrong. The lack of an environmental policy in the government of President George Bush Jr in 2002 set the precedent for further regimes to ignore the environmental Armageddon that was quickly approaching.  
  
Others, led by writers such as Bjorn Lomborg and the Skeptical Environmentalist would discount the "environmental doom and gloom" and would then fall prey to its catastrophic effects. Adam Smith's invisible hand would haul back and bitch slap the world with crippling force. How could anyone regulate a world gone mad, demanding more and more to fuel the sacred god "Economy" and status quo? Demand had gone beyond the bounds of common sense, leading to senseless destruction. Not even big business or the oil companies could make up for resources that weren't there anymore. It wouldn't just be the land that suffered, but the whole earth.  
  
It truly began with the detonation of a CFC bomb. Why, most would later ask, would anyone sabotage a rowboat when they were sitting in it too? Why would they blow a huge gaping hole in the earth's atmosphere and potentially endanger themselves as well? Easy. It was money. It had to become cheaper for the interests of the big business conglomerates to put people in space, and what better way to encourage mass migration off the earth than to make it uninhabitable? Or, to make it habitable only if their technology was used.   
  
This prompted several things. First of all, a trend toward tunneling. Many of the poor moved themselves below the surface of the earth to avoid the turbulent storms and the unfiltered solar radiation that the over strained atmosphere could no longer buffer. There wasn't much of an ozone layer left to buffer anything at all, and all the other layers of the troposphere had been disrupted too with the introduction of high concentrations of nitrous oxides and flourine atoms.  
  
The richer nations invested in moving their citizens off the earth, into temporary shelters, or into orbiting stations. A massive panic created a huge demand for a "space race." This led to increased pollution as factories sought to make space going vehicles, and the increased stripping of all valued minerals from the lithosphere, destroying many habitats along the way.  
  
It also increased the solar radiation beating upon the surface of the earth, and an even more important part of the natural buffering system of the earth: the oceans. 2/3rds of the world ceased to be productive as harmful UV-A and C rays broke down cellular processes, disrupting photosynthesis of plants and plankton, causing them to die at an alarming rate— even faster than the carbon could be sequestered into the deeper ocean. Food chains dyed out as well, causing mammalian and other predator species to become floating, putrid corpses. The scavengers and heterotrophs had a field day, feasting on decaying matter, but when all the food was consumed, they turned to eating their own species, and finally reached the point of no return. Then they too died, adding to the overloading of the natural pollution and element sinks. Hypoxia and eutrophication were turning the oceans white and green, respectively.  
  
Immediately, the world lost a major source of food stocks with the loss of its ocean capital: fish and other aquatic species. Many third world nations dependent upon fish began to starve slowly, though at first the larger more prosperous nations sought to help their desperate plight.   
  
Things on land got worse too. The disruption in the atmosphere disrupted pollinators and destroyed many food chains. As the larger nations realized what was happening, they quit giving aid to any other countries, instead concentrating their energies on fighting other nations for areas where there was land that could grow sustainable food. Artificial breeding was utilized to create crop species that would withstand high UV and provide high yield foods. Many people moved to highly polluted cities with the idea that at least the pollution in the lower atmosphere provided some protection from the sun. Some grew food indoors, using filtered light from photo-optic cables, made from rapidly decreasing reserves of fossil fuel.  
  
The atmosphere, now drastically declining, was no longer able to withstand all the millions of particles of space dust, rocks and meteors that rained down on it daily. More began to crash to the surface, causing chaos whenever they were big enough to make craters. The earth would begin to look like the moon— a battered patchwork of large holes all over.  
  
Governments concentrated on their own population, to the detriment of all, by ignoring any possible cooperation to stop the downward spiral of the millions on the earth. No-one was willing to listen, because "look where listening has got us " It wasn't helping them save the lives of THEIR citizens, and therefore it took lower priority. Still, millions died. Land available to bury them became scarce as well, since it was needed for agriculture, or mining purposes. Every useable bit was extracted from the soil. People even began to throw their dead into the ocean, or make mass piles of them. Some scientists came up with the idea of reducing the bodies to their elements and using the elements to build what they needed. Using their technology, waste was converted to fossile fuels and other components and reused. But this "recycling" was not enough to overcome the extreme amount of waste that was being generated.  
  
Governments involved in wars gave little thought to worldwide epidemics, and new strains of viruses and other maladies began to spread, mutated by the high exposure to UV radiation. Diseases like AIDS and smallpox spread easily in the cramped conditions underground   
  
and in space, despite precautions. For those too poor to move into space, human frustration rose as well, with people looting, killing and raping each other just for food or shelter.  
  
Religious leaders cried and screamed that it was the end of the world, it was Armageddon, come at last. Fanatically ordering their followers to submit, they beat down the remaining governments in mass hysteria and systematically began ordering mass suicides or deaths when they were denied help by the "spacers."  
  
Added on to the massive diversity loss and death of all other species on the earth, it was becoming a stinking wasteland of rotting corpses, beat down upon by the sun. Only at night were people able to function aboveground, and because of all the wars and nuclear detonation, there were few places left that were not tainted with radiation and unfit for life. Few people now were even willing to venture above the surface. Pollution was vented there, and ignored.  
  
The machines created to be smarter than humans were unable to do anything more than create more pollution to get their masters "off earth." Some, left untended, suffered damage from solar and nuclear radiation and explosions and began to eliminate the very people who had created them to try to solve the ecological disaster that was occurring all around them. Satellites crashed into the earth, causing huge craters or mini tsunami's wherever they landed. These further destroyed life and swept the death of the oceans onto the land. Left isolated in space without any resources, the spacers began to collect anything that came within reach to try to propel them to the moon or asteroid belts where they could find the raw materials to keep themselves alive. They too turned to genetic engineering and hydroponics for their food and survival.  
  
Greater problems remained. The incredible heat generated by high UV radiation and decomposing life caused the earth's oceans to further warm up, and the rate of evaporation all over the earth speeded up, leading to massive acid rain problems in the remnants of the polluted cities. Weather became even more violent and unpredictable as the upper layers of the atmosphere were stripped away by constant bombardment of particles from the sun. Radical atoms that had been split apart were further circulated, causing concentrations of noxious gasses to form in pockets in the atmosphere. The great buffer of the earth, the lower ocean below the thermocline, could no longer handle the temperature change. The temperature on the earth's surface rose 5 degrees on the Celsius scale.   
  
This temperature increase further exacerbated the destruction of the oceans, causing bleaching, mass algal blooms, and then death when the waters became too hot for a certain type of algea. Bacteria activity increased, but it was not enough to slow down the processes o destruction, as the old life processes had become. The temperature increase also altered the entire earth's climate, causing the seas to rise and ice caps to melt, completely covering some countries, and turning others into islands.  
  
Constant bombardment of the earth's disrupted atmosphere and magnetic field begins to affect the earth's surface, with higher incidences of electromagnetic storms. Geothermal and volcanic activity increases as a result, as do earthquakes in number and severity. New land was created, but it was not enough. Earthquakes also disrupted the building of underground shelters from the radiation and destruction of the surface.  
  
Mutation caused by pollution and radiation alter the original human genetic code, causing some humans to become horribly disfigured, or mentally retarded. Others experienced strange side effects from tainted underground water supplies: longer life spans, increased confusion, aggression, and oftentimes amnesia. Some developed strange inabilities to function without gravity– their brains had chemical imbalances that caused them to go slowly insane, despite gene therapy. Eugenics and selective breeding could do nothing when the mutation rate was so high, and the damage to the genome pool so extreme.  
  
The sun, the source of all life and light, had become a scourging hell that visited famine, death, disease and horror upon the surface of the devastated earth.  
  
And yet, gravity remained.  
  
The earth spun, bleeding its guts into the cold vacuum of space, like a dying balloon with a giant hole in it. Thousands died, were born, and then died again.  
  
Life, in small isolated pockets, continued.   
  
The blackness descended like a curtain, with eerie finality.  
  
----------------------------------------------------------  
  
"You see? That's how it was. That's what happened." Vlad's voice was disembodied for a second before he reappeared.  
  
Trin was smiling at her. *oh, boy, here comes some sort of lecture, and then I'll wake up.* was all Lanen could think.  
  
"So, how much did you drink? And don't you think we should get started on that paper now?" Trin asked, enjoying her confusion.  
  
Lanen blinked. This was SO strange. She had no recollection of any drinking or anything else before he had shaken her awake that...morning? Well, there had been the fraternity house, and all that, but what the HECK was going on?   
  
"Look, I don't know what you're talking about, but the earth I know doesn't look like THAT. It isn't even remotely NEAR that. I mean, it's still 2003."  
  
There was a pregnant pause. Vlad's image spoke.   
  
"She must be one of the ones who can't adjust to leaving earth. A shame her psychosis had to appear at a time like this when she was just about able to create a new life here on the Moon. Don't you think that you should take her to the doctor's, Trinidad? She may become violent and start hurting herself."  
  
Now Trin was staring at her as though she were some sort of insect.  
  
"I suppose you're right. Maybe when they screened her, her genetic code had already been mutated after they extracted her and the last bunch from the planet."  
  
Fearful now, Lanen backed away from them, and turned to the panel to run. Racing outside, she turned and looked over her shoulder fearfully.  
  
Blackness grew, spreading over the walls, the floor, like a cancer from the small room, seeping through her, covering and absorbing everything.  
  
The last thing she experienced was a sudden sensation of falling and a stellar blackness pierced by the burning rays of a bright yellow sun, and the sight of an abused brown marble,  
  
spinning and fluttering in time like a trapped   
  
moth.  
  
___________________________________________________________  
  
MY Sources  
  
Scot Sherman's It's the End of the World As We Know It, And I Could Use a Drink.  
  
Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical environmentalist.  
  
It's the End of the World As We Know it....Again.  
  
Copyright Alma Geddon© 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003.   
  
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/9941/  
  
20 Ways the World Could End. Swept away. By Corey S. Powell.   
  
DISCOVER Vol. 21 No. 10 (October 2000)  
  
http://www.discover.com/oct_00/featworld.html  
  
Exit Mundi: A collection of End-of-the-world Scenarios.  
  
Created February 2001: last revised November 2002  
  
http://www.xs4all.nl/~mke/exitmundi.htm  
  
The End of the Classical World. The Internet Medieval Sourcebook.©  
  
created 1996: last revised 1/30/2001  
  
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1b.html 


	3. Tortured Fluttering

So, Here is the next installment of The MOTH, created by yours truly, gaki Lanenkar. Please, read, review, shudder and ENJOY!!! (all you college students out there, you….And be careful at Frat Parties! Never go upstairs!)  
  
______________________________  
  
The world was a white room with blurry moving faces without names and a myriad of voices echoing strangely, as if from down a long tunnel or a vortex of air from the bottom of a pond. "She wasn't damaged by the tranquilizer shot." "See if you can reverse her genetic mutation.." "If we can get this cortical implant in, we can control her behavior if the gene therapy fails at any point…"  
  
The words floated through the syrup of reality, randomly hitting her tympanic membranes. "A little to the left. There. Can you feel that?" "…Very good." "She is progressing nicely. Any signs of reversion?" "A shame that you had to turn her into a drone. She's such a nice looking child." "I can't BELIEVE Trin would befriend such a freak like her." Vlad's voice "We had to shoot her. She went crazy."  
  
How did going crazy constitute running out of a room in denial when two really weird people told you the world had ended, and you were some sort of genetic throwback likened to a cavewoman of the stone age? Made her into a drone? What the heck? What was really happening? What HAD happened to her?  
  
Her mind spiraled back to the beginning of the spinning galaxy- that bright crush of exploding creation that had all the answers to her past: the beginning of memory, the beginning of time, the rebirth of her world. There could be found forgetfulness, protection from the rape of her genetic codes, and the savage misappropriation of her conscious will through electro-cortical stimulation.  
  
There was pain. There was the destruction of the human soul and mind for the irreverent brutality that had taken her happy-go-lucky 21st century college life and warped it into the twisted mass of flesh that lay now upon the stark white lab table to be stabbed and pried apart with knives and then slapped back together with banal disregard to her humanity. There, there were answers to her nightmares.  
  
No, there was no humanity. There were only mutants, and those who were Not.  
  
___________________________________  
  
It was odd; there were only fuzzy fragments of her childhood, drowned instead by the persistently overwhelming imperative strength of the memory of the college fraternity party. She had been drunk—VERY drunk. She had gone upstairs…and then the world went dark. Had she been drugged? What? Snatches of memory flickered in the matrix of limitless stars.  
  
Something had happened at that party. Everyone had died…but she hadn't. Why was that?  
  
The drugs! The drugs they had given her had a strange side effect when the terrorists came with their bio-weapons; she was already in a hospital, and the isolation ward where she had been put mistakenly was untouched. Something…about a chart…they thought she had some sort of new contagion because there were no drugs in her blood, but she'd been bleeding from every pore…why weren't there any drugs?   
  
Dream reality twisted as she rode the trail of another comet fragment of memory. A…hospital? Masked faces arguing over her…"put her in isolation" a voice, disembodied, behind her eyes…no, wait, her eyes were closed! "You've got the whole hospital dying, girl. Nobody knows what it is you've got, but you're still alive. We can't stop this thing. Pretty soon, we won't be able to stop the whole city from going." A bloody cough. "I'm dying too, girl. Lanen, that's your name. And there's no cure…we can't find it."  
  
The first to die had been the other partiers, then, the paramedics who brought her to the hospital. How did she know this information? The cruel truth of it was causing the stars to rumble. She hated herself. Why her?  
  
Blackness with red explosions of suns going supernovae.  
  
Monsters in orange suits bursting in… something yelled about "This one's alive!" and "God damn, the whole city wiped out! Who the fuck would do such a sick thing?!?" "Good job for checking the isolation ward. We've got the carrier, looks like. She supposed to be the first recorded case…and the only survivor." "Get her. The doctor will want to see her." "Careful! Don't break your suits! We don't know what she has…"  
  
Ebola? How could it be anything else? But Ebola was so fatal to everyone who contracted it; it couldn't possibly have been the culprit. Besides, it took three days to liquefy you from the inside out. And everyone else at the party had died much faster…that same night, in fact. They'd started dropping like fruit flies after mating.  
  
And who would give her something like that at a fraternity party? Heck, how could something like that get inside the borders of the United States? What had happened to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta? The National Guard? The Army? The Navy? Heck, the AIR FORCE?!? Wouldn't they have stopped it? What about the CIA? The FBI? Homeland Security?   
  
Where was the vaunted preparedness that the president was always speaking of?  
  
Who had known about it? What had it done to her?  
  
The heat of the galaxy increased as small fragments from the waking world sought to intrude on her sanctuary of pain. "Why isn't the cortical implant working?" "Her brain has flat lined." "The therapy should WORK!"  
  
Frantically she dived toward the galaxy again. Reaching out and embracing the stars, despite how they burned her soul to ashes and dust in the solar winds.   
  
It hadn't decimated the city after all.   
  
No.  
  
It had stopped.  
  
And she had gone into a coma before they could ask her what happened. Nothing they could do would give them the answers as to why she lived, and the others had died. So many others.  
  
In time, they decided to deep freeze her like a Popsicle so that the future would have a chance to figure out what had happened. That, and they could extract samples from her whenever they wanted. Her parents, scientists themselves of some notoriety, were only too willing to donate her unresponsive flesh to "Antarctica" before passing on themselves.   
  
So began her journey as a slab of frozen pork. How did THIS knowledge exist? How would she know something like that unless someone told her? Stranger and stranger.  
  
No-one told her. No. Instead, when she woke up, it was machines that woke her, telling her that she had been infected with a nano-virus. A gene altering nano-virus to be exact. A self-aware nano-virus that had somehow judged everyone at that party to be a threat to its continued existence, and had invaded them and de-coiled their DNA like a spring flattened by a hammer. All at once.  
  
The machines didn't tell her how the nano-virus had gotten there. Nor would they tell her anything else about what it could do. All they did was leave, and then she slept again.  
  
Hibernation.  
  
That's what viruses do, when the living conditions aren't right for them to survive. They cocoon themselves off behind a sturdy protein membrane and wait.  
  
___________________________  
  
AAAND You'll have to wait too! What do you think of this as the next chapter to the Moth? Reveiws please. I'm not feeling terribly motivated to work on the Kagome/Sess fanfic right now. Sorry, but that's how it is. I like doing the research for this story though. It's fun.  
  
I realize this is a bit darker (less comedic relief) than the earlier bit, but hey. It's here!  
  
Oh, a little info on the whole Ebola thing: (according to the CDC)  
  
What is Ebola hemorrhagic fever?   
  
Ebola hemorrhagic fever (Ebola HF) is a severe, often-fatal disease in humans and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees) that has appeared sporadically since its initial recognition in 1976.  
  
The disease is caused by infection with Ebola virus, named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) in Africa, where it was first recognized. The virus is one of two members of a family of RNA viruses called the Filoviridae. There are four identified subtypes of Ebola virus. Three of the four have caused disease in humans: Ebola-Zaire, Ebola-Sudan, and Ebola-Ivory Coast. The fourth, Ebola-Reston, has caused disease in nonhuman primates, but not in humans.  
  
So, there you have it. Are you excited for next time?!?!  
  
SOURCES:  
  
Coven, Emily. Peptides, Antibodies, Membranes…WHAT? Scientists Spell out their approach to SARS. PBS News Online. © 2004 KQED & WGBH. URL: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/hongkong/science.html#1  
  
Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. © Center for Disease Control. November 26, 2003.  
  
URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/spb/mnpages/dispages/ebola.htm  
  
Fullwood Packo Group. Pharmaceutical Industry: Cryogenic Freezing Equipment. © 2003 Packo Inox NV.  
  
http://www.packo.com/en/products_subcategories.dhtml?category_id=1683  
  
Abbadon. Cryogenic Freezing. . © Totse.com 2003.  
  
URL: http://www.totse.com/en/fringe/life_extension/cryogenicfreez170566.html 


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